The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming. The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said. Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. "That's not the way we operate here at NASA," he said. "We promote openness and we speak with the facts." Mr. Acosta said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel whom the public could perceive as speaking for the agency. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.

Dr. Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, is a leading authority on the earth's climate system. He directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute on Morningside Heights in Manhattan. Since 1988, he has been issuing public warnings about the long-term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush administration and Vice President Al Gore.

In 2001, Dr. Hansen was invited twice to brief Vice President Dick Cheney and other cabinet members on climate change. White House officials were interested in his findings showing that cleaning up soot, which also warms the atmosphere, was an effective and far easier first step than curbing carbon dioxide. He fell out of favor with the White House in 2004 after giving a speech at the University of Iowa before the presidential election, in which he complained that government climate scientists were being muzzled, and said he planned to vote for Senator John Kerry.

1. I'm in a position to talk to environmental scientists and they say..

Edited on Sat Jan-28-06 11:59 AM by Triana

....that the ONLY way to decrease the amount CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions being bellowed into the atmosphere is to STOP PUTTING IT THERE. There has been some belief that planting more trees in highly polluted areas will help because trees help absorb the stuff.

Well, according to the scientists I talk to - THEY DON'T. Furthermore, planting too many trees in some areas will cause the humidity to increase and possibly change the soil and other things in those environments, thereby cause OTHER environment issues. NOT TO MENTION that planting additional trees is shown NOT to absorb CO2 or greenhouse gases.

THUS: The only way to cut down on this crap in the air IS TO STOP PUTTING IT THERE and this needs to be done ASAP. THESE ARE THE SCIENTISTS GEORGE BUSH WILL NOT LISTEN TO. And this is what they're saying.

I don't remember where I heard this, but I'll research and post. It is possible to sequester CO2 from the air and trap it in a type of rock, which can then be put somewhere (?) for a long, long, time. (again..??) If I remember correctly, we need to build something like 450,000 of these machines.

The foresters are cautioning against the assumption that forests (like the boreal regions here in Canada) will act as a "sink" indefinitely. Canada had been hoping that it could just keep dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and that the environment would clean it up. But it's looking like there could be a feedback effect ... warmer temperatures will accelerate the emission of CO2 from the soil and lead to more forest fires, besides hampering tree growth (e.g. drought and insect attacks). In some situations, the forest could be a net emitter!

And Dubya's much-trumpeted "forest thinning" plan would likely not have much of an impact -- besides decimating old-growth and putting more money in corporate pockets. Ed Johnson's work in Alberta suggests that, if the climate is warm and dry enough, there would be massive fires regardless. So if we want to avoid this, we would have to keep the projected temperature increase as low as possible -- and as you say, the only way to be absolutely certain of cutting net greenhouse gases is to reduce emissions.

..Nature is ruled by very delicate balances. It's not possible to f*ck with it on a large scale without disasterous results - we know that now with global warming and pollution, etc. The problems we are having now are a result of that fact. We can't "fix" it by messing with it some more.

We can only "fix" it by ceasing to do what we did to f*ck it up in the first place - and even then the damage may be too far gone but we need to do it anyway - it would at least slow things down.

Global warming, according to these scientists and researchers, would probably happen anyway. However, we're accellerating the process tenfold, at least. In other words, climate changes that would otherwise take 1000 years or more to happen for example, are now happening in 100 or 200 years, because of human activity. We're accellerating the process. Big time.

22. Problem with forests-as-sinks approach - it's based on current climate #s

Edited on Sun Jan-29-06 09:20 AM by hatrack

Even if all the assumptions about the ability of forests to absorb excess atmospheric CO2 are in fact, true, these assumptions would hold only under current climatic conditions.

But with what we've seen already on just how rapidly climate is destabilizing, it's a fool's gambit to depend on these conditions holding true in the future. Just look at a little tiny bit of what's going on - thermokarsting and permafrost meltdown across the Arctic and in the boreal, the rapid drying of the Amazon rainforest (combined, of course, with massive deforeststation and development), enormous dieoffs of forest regions in BC and Alaska, changes in soil acidity throughout the eastern and northeastern United States thanks to acid rain deposition . . . the list goes on and on.

On top of that, the Cloud-Cuckoo-Land "Greening Earth" hacks have been loudly pushing the happy assumption that excess CO2 will just make the trees will just grow faster, neatly solving any potential problems. Wrong. Duke/UMich have been running a long-term study in which they introduced an assumed 2050 AD atmosphere to stands of loblolly pine by piping in extra CO2. They discovered that while the trees did show an initial growth spurt under these circumstances, after a few years growth rates slowed to below growth rates in control plots. The high-speed growth simply meant that the trees used up soil nutrients that much faster, until the nutrients were depleted. Growth rates slumped accordingly.

He alleged that Dr. Hansen was required to provide names and number of anyone he'd spoken with so the FBI could keep tabs on them, real KGB crap. I know the NYTimes is going to be pretty wimpy in its coverage, so even if Gore's allegations were true and the Times knew about them, I have no doubts regarding their willingness to cover them up. Still, it would have been nice if they'd gone a bit more out on a limb.

There are so many variables that control what will happen to the human race that it's mind boggling. The one thing that is for sure with all the people on the planet at this time there is no way the earth can keep up.

That the topic of global warming needed more investigation. I read this article this morning. One of Hansen's superiors supposedly said something to the effect of "I'm a presidential appointee" and therefore "my job is to make the president look good", which is referenced in the article. If there has ever been an administration more contemptuous of science and facts - I am not aware of it.

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